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Traditional Mongols worshipped heaven (the "clear blue sky") and their
ancestors, and they followed ancient northern Asian practices of shamanism, in which
human intermediaries went into trance and spoke to and for some of the numberless
infinities of spirits responsible for human luck or misfortune. In 1578 Altan Khan,
a Mongol military leader with ambitions to unite the Mongols and to emulate the career
of Chinggis, invited the head of the rising Yellow Sect of Tibetan Buddhism to a
summit

They formed an alliance that gave Altan legitimacy and religious sanction for
his imperial pretensions and that provided the Buddhist sect with protection and
patronage. Altan gave the Tibetan leader the title of Dalai Lama (Ocean Lama), which
his successors still hold. Altan died soon after, but in the next century the Yellow
Sect spread throughout Mongolia, aided in part by the efforts of contending Mongol
aristocrats to win religious sanction and mass support for their ultimately unsuccessful
efforts to unite all Mongols in a single state

Monasteries were built across Mongolia, often sited at the juncture of trade and
migration routes or at summer pastures, where large numbers of herders would congregate
for shamanistic rituals and sacrifices. Buddhist monks carried out a protracted struggle
with the indigenous shamans and succeeded, to some extent, in taking over their functions
and fees as healers and diviners, and in pushing the shamans to the religious and
cultural fringes of Mongolian culture

Tibetan Buddhism, which combines elements of the Mahayana and the Tantric schools
of Buddhism with traditional Tibetan rituals of curing and exorcism, shares the common
Buddhist goal of individual release from suffering and the cycles of rebirth. The
religion holds that salvation, in the sense of release from the cycle of rebirth,
can be achieved through the intercession of compassionate buddhas (enlightened ones)
who have delayed their own entry to the state of selfless bliss (nirvana) to save
others. Such buddhas, who are many, are in practice treated more as deities than
as enlightened humans and occupy the center of a richly polytheistic universe of
subordinate deities, opposing demons, converted and reformed demons, wandering ghosts,
and saintly humans that reflects the folk religions of the regions into which Buddhism
expanded. Tantrism contributed esoteric techniques of meditation and a repertoire
of sacred icons, phrases, and gestures that easily lent themselves to pragmatic (rather
than transcendental) and magical interpretation. The religion posits progressive
stages of enlightenment and comprehension of the reality underlying the illusions
that hamper the understanding and perceptions of those not trained in meditation
or Buddhist doctrine, with sacred symbols interpreted in increasingly abstract terms.
Thus, a ritual that appears to a common yak herder as a straightforward exorcism
of disease demons will be interpreted by a senior monk as a representation of conflicting
tendencies in the mind of a meditating ascetic

In Tibet Buddhism thus became an amalgam, combining colorful popular ceremonies
and curing rituals for the masses with the study of esoteric doctrine for the monastic
elite. The Yellow Sect, in contrast to competing sects, stressed monastic discipline
and the use of logic and formal debates as aids to enlightenment. The basic Buddhist
tenet of reincarnation was combined with the Tantric idea that buddhahood could be
achieved within a person's lifetime to produce a category of leaders who were considered
to have achieved buddhahood and to be the reincarnations of previous leaders. These
leaders, referred to as incarnate or living buddhas, held secular power and supervised
a body of ordinary monks, or lamas (from a Tibetan title bla-ma, meaning
"the revered one)". The monks were supported by the laity, who thereby
gained merit and who received from the monks instructions in the rudiments of the
faith and monastic services in healing, divination, and funerals

Buddhism and the Buddhist monkhood always have played significant political roles
in Central and Southeast Asia, and the Buddhist church in Mongolia was no exception.
Church and state supported each other, and the doctrine of reincarnation made it
possible for the reincarnations of living buddhas to be discovered conveniently in
the families of powerful Mongol nobles

Tibetan Buddhism is monastic. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Outer
Mongolia had 583 monasteries and temple complexes, which controlled an estimated
20 percent of the country's wealth. Almost all Mongolian cities have grown up on
the sites of monasteries. Yihe Huree, as Ulaanbaatar was then known, was the seat
of the preeminent living buddha of Mongolia (the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, also known
as the Bogdo Gegen and later as Bogdo Khan), who ranked third in the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. Two monasteries there contained
approximately 13,000 and 7,000 monks, and the prerevolutionary Mongol name of the
settlement known to outsiders as Urga, Yihe Huree, means big monastery

Over the centuries, the monasteries acquired riches and secular dependents; they
gradually increased their wealth and power as those of the Mongol nobility declined.
Some nobles donated a portion of their dependent families - people, rather than land,
were the foundation of wealth and power in old Mongolia - to the monasteries; some
herders dedicated themselves and their families to serve the monasteries either from
piety or from the desire to escape the arbitrary exactions of the nobility. In some
areas, the monasteries and their living buddhas (of whom there were a total of 140
in 1924) also were the secular authorities

In the 1920s, there were about 110,000 monks, including children, who made up
about one-third of the male population, although many of these lived outside the
monasteries and did not observe their vows. About 250,000 people, more than a third
of the total population, either lived in territories administered by monasteries
and living buddhas or were hereditary dependents of the monasteries. With the end
of Chinese rule in 1911, the Buddhist church and its clergy provided the only political
structure available, and the autonomous state thus took the form of a weakly centralized
theocracy, headed by the Jebtsundamba khutuktu in Yihe Huree

By the twentieth century, Buddhism had penetrated deeply into Mongolian culture,
and the populace willingly supported the lamas and the monasteries. Foreign observers
had a uniformly negative opinion of Mongolian monks, condemning them as lazy, ignorant,
corrupt, and debauched, but the Mongolian people did not concur. Ordinary Mongolians
apparently combined a cynical and realistic anticlericalism, sensitive to the faults
and the human fallibility of individual monks or groups of monks, with a deep and
unwavering concern for the transcendent values of the church